Her voice was shiny

OK. She looked beautiful, if lo-resscreen shots with everybody else cropped out counted. An enormous tangle of untamed mahogany-colored hair. A wondrous bosom. Mysterious eyes. A lovely smile. Will wasn't working from a check list exactly, but Bethany Byrne had gorgeous legs, and that was important to him in complicated ways. If these photos had tumbled out of an envelope from a Casting Director, Will Stover the producer would definitely be setting up a meeting.

Stover had a bad time once with a girl and a horse. A bad time indeed. When you got right down to it, she’d preferred her stallion to him and—you know—how do you compete with a horse in the first place, right?

The difference, he reckoned, was that that was then—when he and the girl were nineteen or twenty—and this was now, when both of them were old enough to have their stuff squared away.

Bethany’s emails, now that they’d started that, were funny and provocative. She was definitely smart enough, and like Timothy Leary used to say, intelligence is the greatest aphrodisiac.

The hell with it: she’d given him her phone number. Not calling her at this point would only seem churlish.

He punched in the unfamiliar area code. He was feeling a bit like he did back in seventh grade, when the two cutest girls in class used to call him every night after supper and nobody thought to tell him that, no, they weren’t trying to tease him, they were calling him because they thought he was cute. He was cute so MAYBE they’d tease him.

He sipped at his wine, a new little cabernet from Trader Joe's, while the phone hooked up to the satellite or the ground station or the repeater, or whatever, and her landline, or satellite, or however AT&T did it these days. Stover didn’t have a landline at home anymore. He was a hundred per cent cell phone all the way since he’d moved out, an odd choice for a producer who is expected to LIVE on the phone, but Will Stover was an odd choice for a producer in the first place.

--Never been there, he said, but…yeah, I’d hate it. Probably. Definitely. It was the army I think.

--Yes…She turned serious: You mentioned that.

--Can’t seem to get too far from it, he said. And now of course I’m doing a movie about it.

--Write what you know?

--Yeah. Well, there’s no way to tell that story on the tube. People tried back in the 80’s, with CHINA BEACH and…the other one, unh…

--Didn’t see it. I don’t watch much TV.

--Makes two of us.

That giggle again. Like water through the fountains of the Alhambra, so soothing.

--See? she said. We’ve got lots in common! I mean I’d be embarrassed for you to see this old TV I’ve got.

--Nah…

--Seriously. I’m kinda thinking I want to get one of those new ones, the highly definitive ones, but if I don’t watch it, I mean, what’s the point? I haven’t even sent my NetFlix movie back yet. I mean I’d have to watch it before I sent it but—